Voter-Fraud Fraud

The Bush Administration has been proclaiming that the country is awash with voter fraud. Of course, they blamed mainly Democrats for this. After all, Republicans have high morality and rigid values; they would never indulge in fraud of any kind. However, it turns out that all this Republican talk about voter fraud is itself a fraud.

Voter fraud has been used by Republicans to obtain legislation in various states requiring citizens to show restrictive and specialized IDs in order to vote. The laws had little effect on the integrity of voting, but they did prevent some poor people and minorities from voting - most likely for Democrats. John Fund even wrote a book he called, "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy."

A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times. Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate... Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

Standard Republican procedure: if you don't like reality, just change it.

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.... About 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
...
Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

“There was nothing that we uncovered that suggested some sort of concerted effort to tilt the election,” Richard G. Frohling, an assistant United States attorney in Milwaukee, said.

Another Republican accusation with no merit. "So what," Republicans say, "we won the midterm and presidential elections, didn't we?" As the party of religion and values, no less.

However, the party is over. The public is catching on to fraudulent Republican lies, obfuscations, and accusations. This is why citizens voted Democrats into power in the last election.

Republican accusations of voter fraud is a fraud. As long as Republcan frauds continue citizens will switch to the Democratic side. The net result will be that 2008 will bring a landslide victory for Democrats.

The Dems were the big complainers in Ohio and around the country. They were the ones who said elections were stolen. Fraud is a problem, but I do not recall Republicans being half as loud as Dems.

I wrote on this blog on many occassions that I believe there were irregularities, but that they did not sway elections, which are statistical events.

So we should all agree with what I said that in recent times, no major election outcome has been changed by cheating.

We should still investigate all cases. Now I am making the Dem case too.

Paul

You are a man of great integrity. I have seen that. I agree with you that fraud should be investigated, but that we have no evidence that cheating has changed outcomes. We differ only on details. But soon some of your more enthusastic fellow party members will arrive with then tin foil theories. It will be messy.

Jack
Again. Elections are Mathamatical Events,not statistical if they are run acording to law. Surveys and polls are statistical.
Is voter suppression right? Is illegally and uncorrectly dis-enfranchising people right?
The accusations of voter fraud are old news from the right. It is one of the reasons for federal attorneys firing. Some of them failed to pursue non-existant crimes.This stems from a deep resentment by some on the right that people of color are allowed to vote at all. That poor people are allowed to vote at all. They just cannot believe that anyone might have good reason to disagree with them,the masters of the universe.

Pain is a good motivator.
Too bad it has to be that way, but that’s the cycle.
Voters only have themselves to thank for it, because too many are simply too lazy to care.
78 million (39%) of 200 million eligible voters don’t even bother to vote.
They will learn, eventually, the hard way or the smart, responsible way.
Unfortunately, some pain and misrery is already in the pipeline, with the debt that is already out of control, and 77 million baby boomers will soon start becoming eligible for entitlements at a rate of 13,175 per day.

While the Dem and Repub blind party-loyalists fuel and wallow in the petty, circular, divisive, distracting partisan warfare, and continues to ignore the nation’s most pressing problems, the less likely we will be able to chance course in time to avoid the approaching painful consequences of so much massive debt, borrowing, spending, excessive money printing, graft, pork-barrel, corruption, graft, waste, and government that continues to grow and grow to nightmarish proportions.

Neither Democrat or Republican politicians want to fix voter fraud.
Democrat politicians want to make it easier for illegal aliens to vote in our elections (many of which also want to give Social Security benefits to illegal aliens; BILL S.2611, Amendment # 3985).

If either one were serious about reforms, we’d see some reforms.
But there are none.
No votes have been passed on election reform.
Rep. John Conyers was supposed to be lookin’ into all that voter fraud, but nothin’ much came of it.
Perhaps that is because John Conyers had one of the worst attendance records for even showing up to vote himself. Why give the duty to someone that doesn’t even take the duty of voting very serious?

So, why not put an end to Gerrymandering?
Why do Dems and Repubs alike make it so difficult (or impossible in some cases) for independent and third party candidates to get on the ballots.
The two party duopoly is blocking access to the ballots for third party and independent voters.
Yet, both want to pretend they are above reproach? It’s truly laughable.

Do-Nothing Congress can’t get much of anything done anymore …

No Election reform.

No Campaign Finance reform.

No end to Government FOR-SALE. 83% of all federal campaign donations (of $200 or more) come from a tiny 0.15% of all 200 million eligible U.S. voters; the other 99.85% are being out spent (and out represented; that’s why politicians carry the water for their big money donors).

No end to Gerrymandering.

No end to voter fraud. It may not be much based on all votes, but with close elections like some we’ve seen, it becomes very important.

No end to illegal immigration.

No end to politicians pitting Americans and illegal aliens against each other.

No end to the pork-barrel, graft, and waste.

No end to the insidious, dishonest excessive money printing.

No end to the bribing voters with their own tax dollars.

No end to eminent domain abuse.

No end to corpocrisy, corporatism, corporate welfare, graft, subsidizing corporations, selling out Americans, and other manifestations of unchecked greed.

No end to a dysfunctional judicial system.

No end to massive debt and borrowing.

No end to massive trade deficits.

No end to growing 1% with vast wealth (20% in 1980, now that 1% owns 40% of all wealth).

No ONE-PURPOSE-PER-BILL.

No Balanced Budget Amendment.

No Term-Limits.

No end to plundering Social Security surpluses

No environment concerns.

No Tax reform.

But, there is one thing Congress can do very quickly.
Faster they you can say pork-barrel.
They can reliably vote themselves a raise in a heart-beat, regularly each year, without fail.

Congress just got its 9th raise in 10 years.
That’s because they are doing such a fine job, eh?
In the mean time, our troops tours in Iraq were just extended another three months, of which I’m sure they are very happy about.

Well, one thing for sure, politicians ain’t gonna become more responsible by voters repeatedly rewarding them for being irresponsible by repeatedly re-electing them.

Jack-
First, we should not investigate every claimed incident, only those where evidence indicates something really happened.

Second, this is not merely the passive investigation of these incidents. What has been happening is that political pressure has been put on these US Attorneys to investigate Democrats to a greater extent, timed to affect elections. You say they are statistical events. People are not statistics. They feel, they think, and the Bush White House has been abusing its power to manipulate that through frivolous investigations and prosecutions of Voter Fraud. And don’t tell me they’re not. You don’t get a failure rate like that from following worthwhile leads.

If the Republicans want to win elections through the Federal Government, there is a legitimate, perfectly acceptable means of doing this available to them: good policy.

The Bush White House has used the considerable power of the Federal government to hide things from voters, to try and influence elections with smears and meritless legal action. This is not the behavior we should rationalize for those who lead us. Policy should answer to the needs of the people not the convenience of our parties.

I predicted these responses. It is the typical Dem response. There is no fraud to investigate, but the Republicans must have committed some. They are so clever that they manage to hide all the hard evidence, so innuendo and ghost stories must work.

Stephen

Yes. That is what I mean. Of course you need some investigation to know not to go farther.

Republicans won elections for the last from 1994-2006. There really is not a problem with wining election.

Adrienne

I was wondering how fast we could get to this. I care about voter fraud as I might be concerned about someone robbing my house. But when I come home and find my house has not been robbed, my neighbors’ talk about possibilities is just talk. I do not care about these allegations is because they are investigated by all sorts of people and they never find anything except theoretical possibilities and lots of people telling stories that do not pan out.

However, it turns out that all this Republican talk about voter fraud is itself a fraud.

Just like the Democrats talk about voter fraud in 00 and 04.
Both y’all are taking turns running your mouths about things with nothing to back it up and that y’all know will divide the country. Y’all figure that way no one will notice that y’all are selling the country to the highest bidder.
Got news for both y’all. The voters are starting to catch on. Better change y’alls ways or you’ll find your butts on the outside looking in.

Ron, KAP,
You’re right.
BOTH Dem and Repub politicians are FOR-SALE !
The only argument we hear any more is WHICH is more corrupt.
Does it matter?
It’s like choosing between William Jefferson or Tom Delay.
Both choices suck.
And rewarding them by repeatedly re-electing them will NOT make them more responsible.
Unfortunately, too many voters in trapped in a hypnotic partisan trance, and they ain’t likely to snap out of it until it becomes too painful … which may not be too far off … with the voter fraud, election fraud, government FOR-SALE, massive debt, incessant inflation, the occupation of Iraq, Congress ignoring the Constitution (refusing 568 requests by ALL 50 states for an Article 5 Convention), refusing to enforce existing laws, depicably pitting Americans and illegal aliens against each other, refusing a large number of badly-needed, common-sense, no-brainer reforms.

Jack, Adrienne’s concerns over the voter machines is hardly “tin foil”, Unless you consider MIT to be a tin foil university.

That voter fraud in the form of voter purges and uncounted votes occurred in Florida in 2000 is well documented. That the voting was controlled by the political hack Kathryn Harris and then made moot by the Supremes intervention makes it convenient for those commiting criminal conduct.

There’s a difference between fraud and disenfranchisement. Fraud is where dead people vote, and that’s not happening. Disenfranchisement is where people who should be able to vote are denied the opportunity to vote. Worse still is when properly cast ballots simply aren’t counted. No one is engaging in fraud. The Republican Machine is the main ingredient in disenfranchising Americans.

Paul’s article is a marvel of loopy contorted logic and spin. In his defense, however, he seems to have had some help in this department from the New York Times.

Voter fraud has been used by Republicans to obtain legislation in various states requiring citizens to show restrictive and specialized IDs in order to vote.

Follow that?

Voter fraud isn’t people showing up at the polls with no proof of who they say they are, and no proof that they haven’t already voted a half dozen times. Or for that matter, that the name they wish to vote under even belongs to a living human being. No, voter fraud—now get this—is when the elected representatives of the people pass laws requiring identification to vote.

That’s right! According to Democrats, attempts to stop voter fraud by asking for ID is ITSELF voter fraud! How can that be, you ask? Well, don’t ask. Black is white. Up is down. It’s like, uh, magic. Just move on.

The results of the federal panel’s investigation into the problem of voter fraud was rewritten several times because—why? Now see if you can follow this.

Was it because of Republican interference? Why did some on the panel (whose membership kept changing) think the problem was real and some maintained that it wasn’t?

Was it because it was a bi-partisan panel, half Democrats and half Republicans? Let’s think about this for a minute. The Democratic half of the panel says “There is no problem here.” The Republican half says “Well, that’s not what we think.” So how can we interpret such a disagreement?

Well, obviously, the Democrats were speaking the unbiased, nonpartisan and objective truth and the Republicans disagreed with the truth that flowed like honey from the mouths of those Democrats for nothing but bitter partisan reasons.

In fact, disagreement from half of the panel constituted “revising” the findings of the actual panel, the actual panel, you see, being only the Democrats on the panel. Huh? Don’t ask questions. Especially don’t ask if it wasn’t the Democrats who were trying to skew the findings. Just believe all of this—that this is all Republican impropriety.

Personally, I think that voter fraud or the potential for is is very real and it ought to be looked into. But the last people who should be doing it are bi-partisan commitees composed only of representatives from the two major parties, either of which has a self-serving interest in the matter. An INDEPENDENT investigation should not be made up of half Republicans and half Democrats. And any findings from such a commission should not be trusted by anybody for a second.

Finding that something CAN be done does not prove that it HAS been done, much less who did it. It as AS likely that Dems cheated using the machines but it is MOST likely nobody did.

A ballot box is certainly not tamper proof from a technical point of view. We rely on observation and both parties have the ability to monitor voting. That is the source of security.

SO yes - it is tin foil to extrapolate from the technical possibility to the idea that it DID happen to specific culprits.

Remember with equal logic and justice we can assert that either party cheated. The Dems could also have tampered with machines. Let’s worry about that. Or maybe let’s just be careful.

EdB

You no doubt can point to specific cases that are not some guys who said they could not find the polls or the usual screw ups. You may recall that the biggest problems often happen in Dem controlled jurisdictions. It is usually in places run by Dems where ballots are lost (or unexpectedly found).

You can logically say Dems are the ones making it hard to vote or not counting them. Yes, let’s just say that the Dem political machine is the chief ingredient in disenfranchising voters.

When you think “party machine” what are the legend? Daily, Pendergast, Crocker, Long, Edwards, Tweed. What party are these legendary machines?

Both your opinion and the one above are equally valid. BTW - the next step in this argument is for us to trade stories. Since we have been through this so many times before on this blog, please just look back in the archives.

But the good news (for Democrats) is that if you can ensure that half of the officials looking into such a matter are Democrats, the “official” finding will be that there’s no problem whatsoever and the New York Times will dutifully report it. A matter of fact, the story might even be spun as an example of a Republican attempt to discriminate against voters on the basis of whether or not they’re alive.

If the New York Times isn’t up for it, Paul should write his next article about how God himself is obviously a Democrat since he raises the Democratic faithful to vote on election day.

LO-
There isn’t a real voter fraud problem, so why go through with security measures that put added expense and trouble on voting?

The thing is, even the Republicans out there are finding it difficult to dig up good cases.

You would like to dig up more, because you’re sure there’s something to dig up, but you’re not going to find all the voter fraud for the same reason you won’t find the WMDs. They’re not there. A feeling that something’s there is no guarantee that it’s actually there at all.

Jack-
I would rather have a machine that is secure by design, than one that is secure by the accident that nobody has decided to hack it. It is in your party’s interest and ours to make one’s ballot an honest representation of one’s wishes. External safeguards are welcome, but the voters should not get the message that they aren’t welcome, nor be subject to intrusive monitoring for frivolous reasons.

As for political machines, tell me which party dealt with the Credit Mobilier and the Teapot Dome scandal. Corruption and Machine politics can be attributed to both parties of the time.

On a final note, let me make a comment here.

I have never been able to figure out why the Bush Administration decided to start on such a bad note as the public spectacle of things like the Brooks Brother riot or having John Bolton walk into the middle of a polling count place and pronouncing it closed. The Bush administration has not once, but twice taken slim or non-existant leads and pronounced them mandates.

Why do Bush and Rove not realize how much it weakens one to do things that create doubt as to the legitimacy of the election?

It is best for a candidate to be seen to have earned the political capital they claim, to have won the election not by cheating their opponents, but doing better than them.

The Democrats have not played nearly as dirty as you suggest, not in recent times. The fact of the matter is, the Republicans have not benefited overall from the irregularities that get pinned on them. Legitimacy is not a luxury for an elected government to get what it wants, it’s necessity.

What one person can do, another person can undo. The machines are secure in the practical sense. They are not secure in the theoretical sense. You lock the door on your home, but you really depend on the police to create the secure environment that will make that lock effective.

The reason we went so enthusiastically into the machines was the 2000 complaining in Florida. Those butterfly ballots, designed in the Dem county, were supposed to be improved.

There is no 100% secure way to count votes. People CAN cheat. That does not mean that they get away with it or that it changes the outcome of elections.

Think of those Florida recounts. A few dishonest people could have altered ballots or added a few to the final pile. Ballot boxes “found” at the last minute have elected many Dems. The endless recounts made such an outcome more likely. We would never know if those found votes were true or not.

The Dems have created a serious problem in confidence by demanding a metaphysical certainty of intent of the voter, while maintaining secrecy and not requiring much identification. Any close election that they do not win, they claim dishonesty. Republicans have more class. They did not demand recounts in close election in Virginia of Montana. Dems would have and when they lost they would have claimed unfairness.

I made this same appeal in 2004 and 2006 and I made it again for 2008. Let’s set the rules BEFORE the election and bring up nothing new after. We lost a close one in Virginia. Did I claim dishonesty? Had it gone the other way, I am not sure the Dems would have been as reasonable.

The Journal identified dead people on the voter rolls in all 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died… Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than a 4-to-1 margin. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where higher population produced more matches.

Governor Bill Richardson (NM) in 2004 elections, prevented precinct workers at any of New Mexico’s polls from asking for any form of identification from any voter, or asking their age—even if fraud is obvious.

Democrats are those MOST opposed to requiring identification to vote. Why is that?

Every time a dog, a cat, a dead person, a person in a coma or persistent vegetative state, a felon, a foreigner, or an otherwise ineligible party votes in an American election, or when anyone votes more than once, somewhere an American citizen has been disenfranchised.

The fact is, tens of thousands of voters are disenfrachised in most elections. Yet, some argue that voter fraud is not a significant issue. Never mind that a few hundred votes could have changed the outcome of the 2000 election.

So, to say it’s not a problem is nonsense.
Could it be it’s not a problem as long as a majority of the fraudulent votes are for Democrats?
Yet another example of blind, partisan bias?

But, you know what?
I think BOTH are about equally guilty, and I don’t care much which is MORE guilty.
They’re BOTH ridiculous, and so is the partisan warfare surround this issue and thousands like it.

Which ever party is more guilty of it, or not, it needs to stop. But Congress continually refuses election reform, campaign finance reform, or any badly-needed, no-brainer, common-sense reforms that may even remotely reduce their power, opportunites for self-gain, or reduce the security of their cu$hy, coveted incumbencies.

Keep it up and see where it gets the Democrat party in 2008.
The ranks of voters getting tired of Do-Nothing Congress (Dems and Repubs) are growing, and the continued extreme irresponsibility will simply lead to more pain and misery which will lead to more angry voters. Especially if most voters start to believe their votes aren’t counted.

Despite serious efforts to combat voter fraud, especially by their opponents, especially during election times, only a few hundred cases have been found in a nation of three hundred million where a third of that number voted in the last election. That is not to say it doesn’t occur, but that it isn’t the major problem.

In fact, if we recall what actually happened in 2000, the disputed did not mainly center on voter fraud, but rather on whether people’s votes were being counted.

The Republicans did their best to uncover these frauds, and failed, and most of what they got was small fry stuff.

So what’s the deal with security? Same deal, different side. Now that we have electronic voting, we need it to have a one-to-one correspondence with what people voted. No tricks, difficulties in hacking it, fewer difficulties in using it. The point is not to get security perfect, but instead to get it good enough that it takes elaborate, risky operations to defraud voters.

As for Voter IDs? Again, the issue comes back to whether voter fraud that results in actual votes, not merely people signing up dead people to fill some quota, is a common occurence. As a matter of fact, it’s not.

So, this not being a common occurence, why should we complicate the path to voting for security that won’t much improve the validity of the approach. People don’t put watchtowers and machine gun nests around Walmarts. Security in that regard should match the actual threat level, which as it turns out, tested by the abuse of Republican power, isn’t that high.

Dan-
You are willing to see partisan misbehavior behind everything I stand for. It’s nice little constant dull roar of prejudice on your part that indicates that you really don’t respect other people’s ability to think for themselves.

People aren’t nice, neat, rational, and just like us, and that’s a good thing, because everybody’s imperfect, and it’s for the best that people’s weaknesses are overlapped by other people’s strengths. But you would have everybody give up on partisanship altogether. It’s only when people are unable to admit that others can see the world in useful ways that we get partisan extremity getting out of control.

You continue to use the ad hominem argument that I’m simply biased. But just because somebody’s biased doesn’t mean they’re wrong. That is the reason why the founding fathers put the first amendment in place, rather than try to create some normalizing system to force everybody to believe in one system.

The other side of the system they gave us is just as important: the side where people have to prove their points of view to others. Some may buy your insistence that I am simply partisan, and therefore to be disregarded, but so far, you haven’t really answered the necessary questions. You continue to generalize fallaciously a national trend from one local newspaper’s report of voter fraud. Just because one person’s going into a graveyard and registering dead people doesn’t mean we should put restrictive enforcements on every polling place and let all kinds of partisan observers into a place to intimidate voters. It is better that a few who shouldn’t vote do so, than that an equal number are unjustly deprived of that vote. We should err on the side of enfranchisement, and do our best to keep that error small with our current, sufficient enforcement methods.

Stephen, whether or not voter fraud is a small problem or a large one, the integrity of the vote is crucial to our Democracy and we should be able to agree that it should be fixed.

If it’s only a small problem now, that doesn’t mean it should be ignored and be allowed to fester into a bigger problem. It’s like saying that the fire is only in the kitchen and it’s not as if the whole house is burning, so why bother putting it out.

What’s wrong with requiring IDs from voters?
It’s remarkable how Democrats fight and tooth and nail to prevent even that one small common sense measure, one which needn’t be expensive or difficult at all.

Part of the reason that voter fraud is so hard to prove now is that there are hardly any safeguards guarding the integrity of the vote as it is, which results in there being very little in the way of records to examine.

It’s telling that one party in particular is so determined to keep the status quo.

The refrain you keep repeating about voter problem not being real is based on the opinions of one half of an investigatory team—not surprisingly, the Democratic half. If it can be alleged that Republicans are trying to “revise” these findings, it can just as justifiably be said that the Democrats are involved in a cover-up.

[U.S. District Judge Nanette] Laughrey said it was difficult to gauge the scope of the problem “because the United States has not presented the actual voter registration lists and shown who should have been included or excluded and why.”
“It is also telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States,” Laughrey wrote. “Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

This is the rule, not the exception in the way much of Bush’s crusade against Voter fraud has gone on.

If we’re going to treat the voter fraud problem as a critical problem at this low ebb of cases, we would have to have the government proving that there is a problem on the verge of blowing up. That becomes difficult when you’re not even showing real evidence that a big problem is afoot.

Your logic may be valid on what to do if the problem appears to be out of control, or nearing a tipping point, but only then.

Having failed that burden of proof, I don’t see any reason to cave into these notions that we must spend taxpayer dollars to put another barrier beyond the requirements of registration in people’s way. What’s telling is how far your party has pushed this matter in the absence of evidence to support that level of a push.

Do 120 cases and 86 convictions for this kind of thing merit this kind of push? Does the weasel-wording of a report that goes from “We can find little evidence of this kind of widespread abuse” to “There is a great deal of debate about the subject” justify such measures? I don’t think so.

However much you want to believe that this is a big problem, and we’re just stalling for political reasons, you have this big (or rather, small) unacknowledged problem with your case. Now this might seem like a might big problem in the Republican Echo Chamber, but in a nation where hundreds of millions of people voted in the last Presidential election, the significance of all that to the function of the system pales in comparison to the harm it would do.

If you want to believe this, do so by all means. But without evidence that this is a real problem, you’ll have a hard time convincing those who don’t have a dog on your particular side of this fight.

Stephen, you want to focus on the size of the problem, as though if the problem is “small” by some subjective standard, then it shouldn’t even be addressed.

But that’s not really the issue.

Why is it that you won’t even agree that a voter should be required to show ID before voting? Is that so much to ask? It’s telling that Democrats won’t even concede to that one small common-sense measure.

I’m not talking about a “massive” and expensive program here. I’m merely suggesting that we apply to voting at minimum the same miniscule level of security we demand of somebody who wants to buy a six pack of beer.

You choose to focus on one case in Missouri that a judge said was “difficult to gauge” and insist that one inadequate case represents the entire situation with voter fraud instead of those 86 other convictions. Why not say that 86 convictions is just a drop in the bucket of what is actually going on?

The “weasel wording” of that report cuts both ways. Democrats wanted one version and Republicans wanted the other. The panel was made up half of Republicans and half Democrats, so neither wording is authoratative. If anything, the Republican version—which only says that they couldn’t agree and it was still a matter of debate—seems more accurate than the Democratic version wherein the “we” of “we can find litte evidence” refers only to the opinions of one half of the panel, the Democrats.

You appear to be saying that unless Republicans can prove in the courts that illegal aliens, the dead, cats, dogs and cartoon characters have been voting in elections, then there should be no measures and no safeguards in place to ensure that it never happens.

But even if it hasn’t happened on a wide-scale (yet), all I’m saying is that it shouldn’t. What’s the problem here?

I propose that we safeguard elections to make it harder for Democrats OR Republicans or anybody to commit fraud. Unfortunately, you won’t even concede that in your desire, apparently, to have completely unsafeguarded elections. Why is that, I wonder? I think I know, and if you’re being honest, so do you.

LO-
Less than 150 cases with les than ninety convictions in a nation where over a hundred million voted in the last presidential election. That’s less than one in a million! Objectively speaking, that’s small.

These objective statistics, which exist all the same regardless of what point of view you take, support the position that voter fraud nowadays is very rare. They back the position of the original report. The new version tries to weasel out of it by saying there is a debate. Hell, there’s a debate about whether UFOs and Bigfoot exist. Should we base air safety rules on the former, and wildlife legislation on the latter? The authority of a good report is based on evidence, on what can be proven, not what can be conjectured, or the fact that there’s disagreement.

Unless you prove that the kind of voting fraud you’re talking about is a serious problem, there’s no sense in treating it like one.

Now the problem I would say deserves attention, especially because of 2000 and 2004, are the voting machines. Those caused problem in more than enough cases, and demonstrated more than enough vulnerabities to merit dealing with. There’s your real problem, the one that stands to cause the most disenfranchisement. If somebody games the electronic voting machines, it could render thousands of votes invalid, and falsify an entire election. The increased safeguards are not needed concerning the voter, but instead concerning the mechanism by which folk’s votes are recorded.

>>If somebody games the electronic voting machines, it could render thousands of votes invalid, and falsify an entire election. The increased safeguards are not needed concerning the voter, but instead concerning the mechanism by which folk’s votes are recorded.

Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at April 15, 2007 12:08 PM

SD,

Yeah, a chad here, a chad there, and we appoint the President of the United States on a vote of five/four.

A hacker here, a hacker there, and we elect the President on the strength of which side hires the most proficient hacker…

Nevermind that the results in 2000 presidential election hinged on only a few hundred votes.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
d.a.n
You are willing to see partisan misbehavior behind everything I stand for.

Nonsense. That’s quite an extapolation.

And it is false. I merely said you were wrong if you think “there isn’t a real voter fraud problem”.
It would take a lot of pages and a long time to address “everything [you] stand for”.
To say there is probable partisan bias behind your statement does NOT equate to “everything [you] stand for”.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
It’s nice little constant dull roar of prejudice on your part that indicates that you really don’t respect other people’s ability to think for themselves.

More nonsense.

Just because I disagree with your statement “there isn’t a read voter fraud problem”, and that it is probably due to partisan bias does not equate to prejudice or disrepect for everyone else. Just those the like to wallow in the petty, circular, divisive, distracting partisan warfare. And who would, except another partisanly blinded person? So, there’s a big difference … but it is hard to see without first removing the partisan blinders.

Again, your statement that “there isn’t a real voter fraud problem” is flatly wrong. Tens of thousands of voters are disenfrachised in every election. If it weren’t, why was Rep. John Conyers appointed to the committee to research it?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
People aren’t nice, neat, rational, and just like us, and that’s a good thing, because everybody’s imperfect, and it’s for the best that people’s weaknesses are overlapped by other people’s strengths. But you would have everybody give up on partisanship altogether. It’s only when people are unable to admit that others can see the world in useful ways that we get partisan extremity getting out of control.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
You continue to use the ad hominem argument that I’m simply biased.

What you write reveals it. For example, before 7-Nov-2006, you criticized Congress (because Republicans had a minor majority). After 7-Nov-2006, you bash Republicans only. Not Congress anymore (because Democrats now have the majority). The bias is very clear. Constant bashing of ONLY Republicans (just look here). Not Democrats. That is a partisan bias. So, it is not an ad hominem argument at all. It is simply the truth.

For example, take this paragraph that you wrote:

It’s time for conservatives to humble themselves. The question is not how to talk to liberals “if you really must”. The question is how you talk to liberals and moderates, period. As highly as conservatives and Republicans might think of themselves and their view of the world, how well they persuade others depends to a greater extent on how others buy what they think and say, than what they think of their own ideas.

Nothing partisan about that?

It appears inflamatory to me.
And why? The Dems already won back the majority.
It’s just fueling the petty partisan warfare.

Here’s another example:The Republicans have learned to accept a great number of failures in practical policy for that reason, and in order to keep winning. They’ve perfected the art of blaming government’s nature for their failings, of not accepting failure as failure, not admitting their mistakes, and Bush has become one of their greatest practicioners of this art.
More fueling the partisan warfare. What is constructive about any of that?

Here’s another example (of MANY):Stephen Daugherty wrote:
A phenomenon seems to be popping up a lot lately: conservatives telling liberals what they really think. They being the liberals, that is. Anyway, it’s reaching absurd apogees as we begin this year with our new congress coming into place. The Republicans are all set to blame the failures of the war and everything else on those dirty liberals.
More fueling the partisan warfare.

I’m not defending Republicans or Democrats.

The point here is about “bias” that is not useful, constructive, or true.
The problem with your bias is that BOTH parties are irresponsible, and the partisan warfare is nothing more than a contest of which is MORE irresponsible.
That’s a fact that blind party loyalists can not admit.
BOTH are irresponsible.
And another inescapble fact is that government will never become responsible until the voters do too, and that ain’t gonna happen by rewarding irresponsible politicians by repeatedly re-electing them. That will only make them more irresponsible, more arrogant, more corrupt, and more distracted from the nation’s most pressing problems.

Excessive partisan bias is rooted in laziness.
Blind party loyalists let THEIR party do the thinking.
All the blind party loyalist voters have to do is go pull the party-lever (i.e. vote straight ticket).
That’s what you did in the last election. Right?
I’m assuming the answer is yes because the question has been asked many times, but there was no response.
The partisan warfare is very powerful and very effective.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
That is the reason why the founding fathers put the first amendment in place, rather than try to create some normalizing system to force everybody to believe in one system.

* SIGH *

Stephen,
No one is trying to force you to do anything.
These tactics are just lame.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
The other side of the system they gave us is just as important: the side where people have to prove their points of view to others.

That’s right. Facts, evidence, and logic are the proper tools.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
Some may buy your insistence that I am simply partisan, and therefore to be disregarded, but so far, you haven’t really answered the necessary questions.

Stephen,

People are free to decide whatever they like.
I never told anyone else you should be disregarded.
These constant vast extrapolations are merely a clever tactic to shift focus, and cloud the facts.
Besides, to argue that you aren’t partisan is a bit difficult when you admit and claim to be Democrat, and your writing are so clearly pro-Democrat and so anti-Republican.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
You continue to generalize fallaciously a national trend from one local newspaper’s report of voter fraud.

Are you serious?

Why was Rep. John Conyers appointed to the committee to investigate it.
You’d be wise to not damage your credibility further trying to diminish the seriousness of voter fraud.
If you’d like, I can show you many hundreds of cases of voter fraud.
Go over to Ohio and tell the people of Ohio they don’t have any voter fraud and/or disenfranchisment.
Besides, again, when elections are close, every vote is important (i.e. the presidential election of 2000).

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
Just because one person’s going into a graveyard and registering dead people doesn’t mean we should put restrictive enforcements on every polling place and let all kinds of partisan observers into a place to intimidate voters.

Who said that was the solution was to intimidate voters?

This is yet another vast extrapolation to shift focus, cloud the issue, and obscure the facts.
It ain’t gonna work.
Requiring identification to vote is not restrictive.
It’s just common-sense.
Especially when 12+ million illegal aliens are in our country.
Especially since dead people are voting.
Especially since close elections make it important to get a reliable and accurate vote count.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
It is better that a few who shouldn’t vote do so, than that an equal number are unjustly deprived of that vote.

? ? ?

What do you mean?
Are you talking against voter identification?
How is requiring identification going to unjustly deprive someone of a vote?
That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.
If you go to bank to withdraw money, don’t they ask for identification?
These arguments against showing identification to vote are so, so lame.
So, you are settling for imperfection again, eh?
Are you saying you’re OK with some voter fraud?
Sort of like the imperfections of YOUR party, eh?
I am very suspicious of this policy you promote.
Could it really be because most voter fraud helps Democrats?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
We should err on the side of enfranchisement, and do our best to keep that error small with our current, sufficient enforcement methods.

Dan-
The convictions for voter fraud, with about a hundred million voters in 2004 were less than one in a million. I cannot emphasize enough that this is why I’m saying there isn’t a big voter fraud problem. That one in a million figure looks the same from any direction. Even if there are nine incidents unreported for every conviction, you still only have one for every person in an average small city.

So given the rarity of real voter fraud, why the push to clamp down on it? No, the real problem is abuse of official power to knock people off the voting rolls. We need to get the government’s hands off more voters, not give them even more leverage to disenfranchise people. I surely don’t advocate allowing voting fraud to go on, but If I don’t see much voting fraud out there to actually be concerned about, I don’t see the reason for getting all police state about it.

As for my quoted statement? You badly misinterpret it. I ask the humility from the right that I also ask from the left. If you understand that my general principle on these matters is that civility in public discourse is superior to nastiness, then you are closer to understanding my rather non-partisan point. Republicans should no more condescend to Democrats than Democrats to Republicans. Respect is a virtue for those seeking to create constructive politics.

As for My statement about the Republicans accepting a great number of failures in practical policy, this is much the same as what you have said yourself. If you watched Bush’s behavior during Katrina, the ongoing debacle of Iraq, you’d see this pattern of behavior. Hell, wasn’t this what got people fed up with the Republicans, going into 2006?

Republicans, when confronted by failures in government, often say that this just proves their theory about the inferiority of big government intervention. As a person who has seen better from my government, this is an unacceptable excuse. It seems to be a cynical response to irresponsbile behavior and dysfunctional policy, and I believe I am right in singling this attitude out for criticism. whether you want big government or small, good government should be a priority for all.

Then there’s the next paragraph. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that what I really want to do is leave America open to attack, embolden the enemy, or whatever else. I am sick to death of people telling me I want to see America taken over by the mullahs, sick to death about being treated as if I’m unpatriotic.

I don’t like to be misunderstood, and I will not stand for being assigned the motivations and morals of a B-movie villain. People have pride, and folks have done a lot to stomp on that pride this past decade. Is it so wrong for people like myself to correct people on what we believe, to dispel these false defamation?

In the end, the question of partisanship is like the question of bias. The question being: why and how is this person wrong? Instead of laying out this blanket charge of partisan warfare, why not look into the charge, see what’s right and what’s wrong, and seek to moderate what’s wrong. If you can be persuasive in that, persuasive in filling in the gap, then you’ve done more than resist the evils of partisanship, you’ll have managed to fight it well in others.

Getting back to the voting fraud thing, the Bush administration aggressively went after Voting Fraud among Democrats- abusively, even. Yet we have less than 150 cases brought before a court, less than 90 cases ending in conviction. A number of those have been successfully appealed.

Every vote is important, but if the incidence of the problem is not that great, as the extremely low number of court cases and convictions suggest, then measures like voter IDs, with their costs and bureaucratic requirements would possibly have a counterproductive effect, discouraging and preventing people from voting.

The presumption should be on the side of the right to vote. There should be a minimum of barriers put between folks and their democratic right to vote. That’s all. If you want to make this sentiment of mine partisan, go ahead. But my sentiment is that we shouldn’t put too much power in government’s hands to prevent folks from voting, especially given what people like Bush and Rove do with that power.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
d.a.n
The convictions for voter fraud, with about a hundred million voters in 2004 were less than one in a million.

Clever, but not all violators are caught and convicted.

Also there were 120+ million of 200 million eligible voters in 2004.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
I cannot emphasize enough that this is why I’m saying there isn’t a big voter fraud problem.

OHHhhhh … now you’re saying it’s not a big problem.

I disagree.
When elections are close, all votes become very important.
If it wasn’t a problem, then why was Rep. John Conyers appointed to investitage it?
Have you forgotten the voter fraud and disenfranchisement in Ohio in 2000?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
That one in a million figure looks the same from any direction. Even if there are nine incidents unreported for every conviction, you still only have one for every person in an average small city.

For every conviciton, there are many others never convicted.

If the number convicted is 100 times less than the actual violations, then you’re looking at 12,100 violations, which agrees with a report I saw that stated the violation were in the tens of thousands per election. Trying to focus on convictions alone is a clever trick but you should know better.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
So given the rarity of real voter fraud, why the push to clamp down on it?

Again, tens of thousands of cases per year is not a rarity.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
No, the real problem is abuse of official power to knock people off the voting rolls.

That’s a problem too. But changing the subject won’t change the fact that tens of thousands of voters are disenfranchised.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
We need to get the government’s hands off more voters, not give them even more leverage to disenfranchise people.

Nonsense.

We need voters to have to identify themselves.
Just like their bank does to make a withdrawl from their bank account.
Just like their driver’s license that helps to certify their fitness to drive.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
I surely don’t advocate allowing voting fraud to go on, but If I don’t see much voting fraud out there to actually be concerned about, I don’t see the reason for getting all police state about it.

“getting police state about it” ? Nonsense.

Yet another ridiculous extrapolation.
Requiring voter identification does not equate to “getting police state about it”.
I’m beginning to suspect you’re OK with it because you know most of the fraudulent vote go to Democrats.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
As for my quoted statement? You badly misinterpret it. I ask the humility from the right that I also ask from the left. If you understand that my general principle on these matters is that civility in public discourse is superior to nastiness, then you are closer to understanding my rather non-partisan point.

Civility? You think fueling the partisan warfare is civil?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
Republicans should no more condescend to Democrats than Democrats to Republicans. Respect is a virtue for those seeking to create constructive politics.

Then why do you fuel the partisan warfare (see your quotes above)?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
As for My statement about the Republicans accepting a great number of failures in practical policy, this is much the same as what you have said yourself. If you watched Bush’s behavior during Katrina, the ongoing debacle of Iraq, you’d see this pattern of behavior. Hell, wasn’t this what got people fed up with the Republicans, going into 2006?

People need to get fed up with Democrat AND Republican politicians.

Not all that is wrong in the world is just the Republicans fault.
And fueling the partisan warfare isn’t helping anything.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
Then there’s the next paragraph. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that what I really want to do is leave America open to attack, embolden the enemy, or whatever else. I am sick to death of people telling me I want to see America taken over by the mullahs, sick to death about being treated as if I’m unpatriotic.

What in the world are you talking about?
I never said you did, nor believe you do. Get a grip.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
I don’t like to be misunderstood, and I will not stand for being assigned the motivations and morals of a B-movie villain. People have pride, and folks have done a lot to stomp on that pride this past decade. Is it so wrong for people like myself to correct people on what we believe, to dispel these false defamation?

No. Likewise for everyone else.

That’s why fueling the partisan warfare is wrong.
Also, diminishing the voter fraud issue is suspicious.
Is it because most of those voters are for Democrats?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
In the end, the question of partisanship is like the question of bias. The question being: why and how is this person wrong? Instead of laying out this blanket charge of partisan warfare, why not look into the charge, see what’s right and what’s wrong, and seek to moderate what’s wrong. If you can be persuasive in that, persuasive in filling in the gap, then you’ve done more than resist the evils of partisanship, you’ll have managed to fight it well in others.

Partisanship is OK, unless it clouds judgement.

And that is what happens, over and over.
It’s is extremely obvious.
Your own writing make it extremely obvious.
The fact is, BOTH parties are irresponsible.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
Getting back to the voting fraud thing, the Bush administration aggressively went after Voting Fraud among Democrats- abusively, even. Yet we have less than 150 cases brought before a court, less than 90 cases ending in conviction. A number of those have been successfully appealed.

So? You think they should be pardoned?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
Every vote is important, but if the incidence of the problem is not that great, as the extremely low number of court cases and convictions suggest,

Wrong.

Again, the total court cases does NOT represent all instances of voter fraud.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
… then measures like voter IDs, with their costs and bureaucratic requirements would possibly have a counterproductive effect, discouraging and preventing people from voting.

That’s pure nonsense.

You equate showing identification as “getting all police state about it” ?
You must be having a bad day, because your arguments are getting pretty lame.

With 12+ million illegal aliens, why wouldn’t you want voter identification?
OHHhhhh h h h … because they will most likely vote Democrat?

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
There should be a minimum of barriers put between folks and their democratic right to vote. That’s all. If you want to make this sentiment of mine partisan, go ahead. But my sentiment is that we shouldn’t put too much power in government’s hands to prevent folks from voting, especially given what people like Bush and Rove do with that power.

You’re right.

I’m beginning to think you have ulterior motives for diminishing the voter fraud issue.
And where did any one say anything about preventing people from voting?
Just people that are not supposed to vote … like illegal aliens, or people trying to voter more than once, or people trying to vote for dead people, or their pets, etc., etc., etc.

Your opposition to voter identificaiton and diminishing the issue of voter fraud is very strange indeed.

And just because voter fraud may not be as serious as the claims of rampant voter fraud does not diminish the seriousness of it; especially when important elections (such as the presidential election of 2004) come down to only a few hundred votes.

Gerrymandering is also another form of voter fraud.
Voter suppression is a problem too.
But requiring identification is not an unreasonable request.
Especially with 12+ million illegal aliens, and reports of some voting in our elections.

Dan-
You can can call my figures clever, but they are real, and the comparisons a simple matter of math. I present the one to ten ratio as hypothetical, and do not base any claims on such unproven material.

It is important to base legal action and legal barriers to voting on verifiable and verified information, because that is the basis of due process in our nation. Perhaps the problem is the way they investigated, or that they didn’t investigate the right people. All that, though, is in the realm of speculation.

If we really wanted to keep voting secure, we could require biometrics out the ying-yang, make every vote’s acceptance contingent on a fingerprint match, require a voice print and everything else, to verify they are who they are. You would, of course, as a rational person argue that this is excessive. You’d say this because there’s a point at which the gains from the security aren’t that great.

Based on the relative rarity of convictions for these offenses, I believe we’re pretty much at that point. I’m not saying this because I think it will help my party, I simply don’t see the point if the convictions are so low on the voter side of things.

I’d like to see the report you base your opinion on. It’s important to watch for the weasel words, to watch what kind of conclusions people make and why. Accusations are not the same as indictments, indictments not the same as convictions. If the problem is the enforceability, we need to understand what the law and the precedents say.

We do not need to be denying people the ability to vote because of what we fear to be true. You might fear that illegal aliens are voting, but are they? Do these people tend to show up at polling places? What is the evidence that shows you that they are voting, and how are they managing this given the lengths one needs to go to register? Additionally, if one has to present some sort of identification or proof of citizenship to register, what’s the purpose of a voter ID? It’s redundant. That’s where you can best screen out illegals, if that is indeed a problem.

I don’t believe any party should benefit from fraudulent votes. I don’t believe in fueling partisan warfare as you insist. I believe that certain troubles emerge naturally from any adversarial system, and people can get caught up in their efforts to advocate for what they believe in. They can end up accusing people of doing things or believing things that respectively they didn’t do and don’t believe.

I strongly disagree with what a number of people say and believe. But there are genuine disagreements behind much of that, and those would not suddenly resolve themselves magically if I stopped being a Democrat.

You accuse me of fueling partisan warfare, but illustrate that with quotes that have me saying that:

1) Civility in public discourse is superior to nastiness.

2) That I expect a degree of humility from both sides.

3) That the parties shouldn’t condescend to each other.

4) That respect is a virtue for those seeking to create constructive politics.

These principles, which form the core of those comments, are not built on the glorification of divisive words and attitudes, but the hopes and dreams of something better.

To further illustrate what you saw as my fueling of partisan bias, you quote this one comment where I complained of Republicans putting words into Democrat’s mouths concerning their beliefs. That is the origin of my complaints concerning folks telling me that I want to drop America’s defenses, about folks assigning me the character of a stereotypical villain.

Having quoted this material, you once again turn around and tell me that fueling partisan warfare is wrong, and that my opinion that the voter fraud issue is not that serious results from the partisan wish to see illegitimate votes go to Democrats.

You then imply that I might want the voter fraud perpetrators pardoned, that I would have illegal aliens voting for your party.

All because I take the number of convictions during a very diligent period of five or six years of aggressive investigation of voter fraud cases to be indicative of how the problem is shaping up. You seem to be going an awful long way in your insinuations to try and convince me that I’m a slimeball partisan operator for not believing the way you want me to believe.

You’re looking for reasons, at least on this matter, to believe the worst of me and those in my party. I’m telling you the truth about what I believe and why I believe it. If you can’t take that at face value, then there’s nothing I can do for you.

Seems like the Republicans win either way: If individual voter fraud is prosecuted, John Q. Public says, “Hmmm, guess those Republicans were right about needing to make it harder to vote.” If no convictions result, JQP says, “Hmm, guess all that stuff about the Republicans fixing elections is bunk.” They can’t lose. Unless, of course, the voters are more intelligent than the Republicans give them credit for.

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
There isn’t a real voter fraud problem, so why go through with security measures that put added expense and trouble on voting?
With close elections, it’s a problem.

If it’s not a problem, what was Rep. John Conyers doing investigating it a few years?

Portraying the requirement for voter identification as “getting all police state” is a huge stretch.

So, are you against voter identification?
If so, why?
Saying it’s “getting all police state” isn’t a good answer.

You accuse me of fueling partisan warfare, but illustrate that with quotes that have me saying that

Fueling the partisan warfare is definitely true, as illustrated by the following statements:

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
It’s time for conservatives to humble themselves. The question is not how to talk to liberals “if you really must”. The question is how you talk to liberals and moderates, period. As highly as conservatives and Republicans might think of themselves and their view of the world, how well they persuade others depends to a greater extent on how others buy what they think and say, than what they think of their own ideas.

Nothing partisan about that?

Here’s another example:

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
The Republicans have learned to accept a great number of failures in practical policy for that reason, and in order to keep winning. They’ve perfected the art of blaming government’s nature for their failings, of not accepting failure as failure, not admitting their mistakes, and Bush has become one of their greatest practicioners of this art.

More fueling the partisan warfare.

Here’s another example (of MANY):

Stephen Daugherty wrote:
A phenomenon seems to be popping up a lot lately: conservatives telling liberals what they really think. They being the liberals, that is. Anyway, it’s reaching absurd apogees as we begin this year with our new congress coming into place. The Republicans are all set to blame the failures of the war and everything else on those dirty liberals.